Jon Foster

The cast sounds promising: Billy Bob Thornton as an icy studio head; Mickey Rourke as an amoral lowlife; Chris Isaak as a drunken philanderer who can’t resist making sloppy passes at his son’s dates; and the late Brad Renfro, in his final role, as a jittery hotel clerk with possible connections to the shadiest of underworlds.

For all the youthful hedonism and reckless behavior on display in Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his strangely stillborn adaptation of Michael Chabon’s first novel, there’s something sorely missing – a sense of danger, perhaps, or a hint of intrigue.